I’m not sure if I missed this reading the story or that but did it state what concessions were made to Tierra by Antar such as did Tierra gain more land or did the Antari have to pay tribute etc when Tierra won the war?

I’m not sure if I missed this reading the story or that but did it state what concessions were made to Tierra by Antar such as did Tierra gain more land or did the Antari have to pay tribute etc when Tierra won the war?

No.

The only thing Antar owes Tierra now are some reparations (which they have no intention of paying), as well as an assurance that they aren’t going to go to war again for another couple decades (I don’t know the exact number - I think it was 20 or 30.)

Miguel’s original demands were steeper, but the Takarans forced him to abandon or reduce most of them.

I’m not sure if I missed this reading the story or that but did it state what concessions were made to Tierra by Antar such as did Tierra gain more land or did the Antari have to pay tribute etc when Tierra won the war?

Hopefully Tierra can avoid a position where entering a defensive alliance with either power, and thus agreeing to enter their sphere and subordinate ourselves to them, isn’t nescessary. In my mind, until Tierra is strong enough to forge an alliance of (relative) equals, rather than master and slave, tying ourselves to either is an option of last resort.

Imagine someone who was born into one of the First Families of Virginia or one of the old Boston Brahmin families. Say he can trace descent from George Washington or Robert E. Lee, or both (entirely possible, since Lee married into Washington’s in-laws). Say he joins the Marine Corps as an officer, rises to the rank of Major General - one of the youngest in his generation - commands 1st MarDiv for a significant period of time, retires, becomes an ambassador, successfully “defuses” a flashpoint in some third-world country, is elected to the Senate, and becomes Secretary of State and Senate Majority Leader.

Imagine someone who was born into one of the First Families of Virginia or one of the old Boston Brahmin families. Say he can trace descent from George Washington or Robert E. Lee, or both (entirely possible, since Lee married into Washington’s in-laws). Say he joins the Marine Corps as an officer, rises to the rank of Major General - one of the youngest in his generation - commands 1st MarDiv for a significant period of time, retires, becomes an ambassador, successfully “defuses” a flashpoint in some third-world country, is elected to the Senate, and becomes Secretary of State and Senate Majority Leader.

Well, he has absolutely nothing to do with II, and is a good century away from his “senile groper” phase.

So there’s that.

41 is probably both the most qualified and the most under-rated US President of my lifetime. Usually when empires fall there is a great deal of bloodshed, but he helped steer the Soviet Union’s fall to a fairly soft landing, providing quiet, steady and very calm leadership at a time when the wrong words could have sparked a bloody panic behind the Iron Curtain. He mid-wifed Germany’s reunification, believing it would be a positive development for Europe. He also put together the broadest coalition in the US’s history gaining the support of even some of the US’s traditional enemies in Operation Desert Storm to roll back the Iraqi invasion of Kuiwait where he used the military as a scalpel and promptly pulled out. He was careful not to leave a power vacuum in the operation’s wake, something his successors unfortunately were not so mindful of. And for the duration of his presidency, the humanitarian intervention in Somalia to feed its starving people was a great success (although his successor ultimately botched it in his military cluelessness.) The man made foreign policy look easy. Now granted, he inherited a lot to work with, but unlike pretty much every other President I recall, he made no significant foreign policy blunders, not one.

It’s kind of sad to see his legacy tarnished by those groping charges during his final years.

I’m generally positive on Bush 41’s legacy, but I think it’s a little disingenuous to say that there was a soft landing for the Soviet Union. Remember, there is still active fighting going on directly linked to the fairly unorganized dismantling of the Soviet Union.

I’m generally positive on Bush 41’s legacy, but I think it’s a little disingenuous to say that there was a soft landing for the Soviet Union. Remember, there is still active fighting going on directly linked to the fairly unorganized dismantling of the Soviet Union.

Compared to the fall of previous empires, I consider what happened in the Soviet Union’s case extremely mild. That’s not to say that the Soviet Union’s successor states didn’t have grave economic difficulties in their attempts at economic transformation, but the push-back to the independence of its former satrapies was comparatively minor and much less violent and bloody than it could have been.

Compared to the bloodletting that ensued the last time a Russian empire collapsed, I’m willing to give Bush 41 the ending of the Cold War as something in his “credit” column.

That’s because the Russian Empire did not collapse in this instance. It simply shed a number of its satellite states while maintaining a significant majority of the old “Russian Empire.” Even in its reduced form, some 20% of modern Russians are not “Russian.” Sounds like empire to me.

We should also not forget that there are a number of large populations of ethnic Russians outside of Russia that have a likelihood of being snatched back up over the next decade. Not to mention they have a number of unique holdings outside of traditional Russian boundaries. Kaliningrad is an excellent example of that - for those not in the know, Kaliningrad is what was once upon a time Konigsberg.

Given the increased mortality rates and the fairly large amount of armed conflicts in Russia and the former Soviet Republics, it’s hard to get too excited about the end of the Soviet Union. It’s certainly a big positive that the world wasn’t laid to waste and that there wasn’t an equivalent event to the Bolshevik Revolution. Of course the Soviet Union also wasn’t dissolved because it just lost a massive armed conflict to a neighboring enemy that left it with millions of unhappy combat vets that still had their rifles.

Anyhow, not to go down this rabbit hole too much, but we (Americans in this instance) tend to talk about the end of the Cold War in American terms with American causes rather than taking a more holistic view. Some of this is just derived from the idea that we “won” the Cold War, so of course our winning had to do something with the Soviet Union losing. There is certainly something there, but the Russians did an excellent job of doing themselves in.

Plus, we should remember that it was the hardline coup that made Yeltsin famous and insured that the breakup of the Soviet Union would be more significant than what would have likely taken place.

I don’t mean to sound like a nitpicker, just someone who isn’t familiar with either the Cold War history or Russia, but…

PithyTrooper:

That’s because the Russian Empire did not collapse in this instance. It simply shed a number of its satellite states while maintaining a significant majority of the old “Russian Empire.” Even in its reduced form, some 20% of modern Russians are not “Russian.” Sounds like empire to me.

That’s because the Russian Empire did not collapse in this instance. It simply shed a number of its satellite states while maintaining a significant majority of the old “Russian Empire.”

I have to disagree with you on this. The satellite states would have been the Warsaw Pact states, which are now all independent countries and members of NATO. Of the SSR’s that made up the Soviet Union itself, all of them are independent as well. Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, the Central Asian -Stans, etc. Chechnya wasn’t given independence cause it was never an independent SSR, but always part of the Russian SSR. That and the oil, of course. Of the places that Russia never left or took back by force, such as Transnistria, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, no one but Russia recognizes them as independent countries. And no one recognized Russia’s occupation of Crimea or parts of Donetsk or Luhansk as being legitimate either. So while Russia may be a huge country, I really don’t see it as still being an empire.

PithyTrooper:

Even in its reduced form, some 20% of modern Russians are not “Russian.” Sounds like empire to me.

With this, how do you define Russian? Cause if it’s by citizenship, then they are Russians. If you mean to say that they are not ethnically Russian or Russian Orthodox, then I don’t know of any country in the world that fits the criteria of everyone being the same ethnicity or religion.

That’s because the Russian Empire did not collapse in this instance. It simply shed a number of its satellite states while maintaining a significant majority of the old “Russian Empire.” Even in its reduced form, some 20% of modern Russians are not “Russian.” Sounds like empire to me.

I’d say it was comparable to the collapse of the Russian Empire and the rise of the Soviet Union. “Russia” lost a lot of its outlying territories, while maintaining territorial integrity within “Old Russia” and undergoing a regime change which ultimately metastasized into the same sort of Russian autocracy, with new branding.

As for reduced standards of living within Russia itself, remember that at about this time in the USSR’s history (leaving WW2 aside), there was mass starvation in Ukraine and political purges which were gigantic even by Russian standards. I’d like to think the current state of the Russian Federation is probably an improvement over the state of the Soviet Union two decades in.